Struggling with frugality, debt, parenting, and weight

October 2014 Early Retirement Progress

We contributed $4,381.19 this month to our retirement accounts We gained $9,654 in investment gains this month.

This month has a slightly decreased contribution since I took a week without pay to go to Europe this month. So that affected my gross pay and my retirement contributions. It was worth it though!

We’re again in the positive for investment gains this month, and hopefully that continues for the remaining two months of the year. We’re still increasing our account balances mostly via contributions rather than investment gains, but that’s to be expected with the amount we are contributing. Some months, the gains are larger than what we contribute, and sometimes they’re less. They’re averaging less than we contribute though.

I also discovered a disadvantage to Vanguard as my 403(b) provider – they don’t generate monthly statements, unless I’m willing to have them be generated and mailed to me – so I’m winging it on the investment gains in my 403(b) account. Taking the end of month balance and subtracting my known contributions. Otherwise, I’m happy with Vanguard. I have a meeting with a “free” financial advisor on campus on Tuesday – not sure how that will go, but we’ll see. I was able to specifically type in what I’d like to talk about, so we’ll see. I’m going to go in with my Personal Capital “printout” as well as my work laptop, and have my latest Fidelity statements.

2014 Totals

So far, for 2014, we’ve contributed $36,074.26 (90.19% of the new goal of 40k), and we’ve gained $25,599.46 in investment gains (126.35% of our planned total).

It only makes sense to me to break it out, and the monthly statements from Fidelity make it pretty easy – there’s a line for “investment gains” 🙂 But we only have control over how much we contribute, not how the markets do. We can control it somewhat based on our asset allocation, but it’s still a volatile beast. If I don’t measure what I *can* control, I can’t improve it 🙂